– Paddy Moogan, SEO consultant, says:

Interxion, who are a European provider of data centres, collocation and managed services, have carried out a Cloud Insights Survey http://www.interxion.com/cloud-insight/index.html where they asked various questions to businesses across Europe.

You can view the original graphs from the link above. Here are a few of the key points and takeaways from the survey:

Security Concerns
One of the main security concerns for many of the survey respondents (71%) was preventing data loss. This doesn’t come as a surprise really as obviously companies trust that their data is safe and that procedures are in place to prevent the loss of their important data.

In terms of large companies, their concerns were slightly different overall with keeping security up to date (69%) being a concern.

To reassure their customers, data centre service providers should make sure they not only keep their practices up to date, but that they also communicate these practices with their customers so that they can feel assured their data is safe.

Barriers to Cloud Computing
Despite lots of companies moving to the cloud or having plans to in the future, there are still some big barriers to moving to the cloud. Overall the key issues were to do with security and service level agreements. Another understandable factor was the lock in to specific suppliers – 40% of respondents identified this as a concern.

Use of Cloud Today
As mentioned above, a high percentage (69%) of companies consider cloud computing to be a priority. It is small companies that are leading the way in usage of the cloud, 76% of the survey respondents said they were using cloud services or planned to in the next two years.

Investment in Cloud Computing
Looking at the reasons why companies are putting money into the cloud, the top two reasons according to the survey were:

  • Reducing the cost of infrastructure
  • Flexibility

These are not that surprising given the current economic climate which is forcing companies to look at short term goals as opposed to the long term.

What the Cloud is used for
Some of our questions were focused around the most commonly used cloud applications. Given the growth of mobile applications and the popularity of syncing between many devices, the results are not too surprising. The top uses of applications being:

  • Backup and recovery
  • Websites
  • Emails
  • Calendars

This shows the potential for growth in other cloud based applications which are becoming more popular, such as document recovery and CRM systems.